Standard printers generally comprise a printhead mounted to a carriage that moves across a print area in a scanning direction at high speed, while a print medium is conveyed through the print area along a conveying direction transverse to the scanning direction of the printhead. The rapid movement of the printhead may introduce some print defects, but also allow various techniques for mitigating the impact of print defects caused by misplaced or irregular print dots. In particular, different print modes can be employed involving different numbers of passes of the printhead over the print medium, with the highest quality print modes being close to defect free.
In contrast, a page wide array printer has a nozzle array that extends across the width of a page. In this way, in at least one example a moving carriage is not needed, and therefore a page wide array printer may not exhibit the types of print defects associated with the movement of a printhead. A page wide array printer also, however, may lack the flexibility of a printer with a scanning head when addressing print defects caused by missing, misplaced or irregular print dots.